We had our annual visit to the Charleston Festival.   We heard Anne Sebba talk about the experience of French women in Paris during the war, Artemis Cooper on Elizabeth Jane Howard and a debate on the relative merits of Turner and Monet which was unexpectedly won easily by Turner (a vote for a British painter, perhaps).   But most impressive was the view of Firle Beacon and the line of the South Downs as we drove back from a private performance of Weber Invitation to the Dance and Ravel Miroirs:-

An early morning haircut meant that I was wandering the streets of Paddington, admiring the Regency ripple of Gloucester Terrace (actually, post-Regency because it was laid out in 1843 and not completed till 1852):-

And Paddington Station itself, 1853 by Brunel:-

After a few days in Venice, I found myself walking across Norman Foster’s Millennium Bridge and admiring, as I often do, Wren’s great dome to St. Paul’s and wondering how he acquired his knowledge of the emotional force of seventeenth-century classicism, when by temperament he was such a cool and unemotional and technologically minded mathematician, whose knowledge of European architecture was limited to a single short visit to Paris in 1663 and study of the precepts of Italian architecture through books and engravings:-

I had been through the Arsenale before and was pleased to go through more slowly, appreciating, for example, Franz Erhard Walther’s Wall Formation ‘Yellow Modeling’:-

I was pleased to see the New Zealand pavilion by Lisa Reihana;  and again admired what I realised was the Italian pavilion, including Giorgio Andreotta Calò’s Senza titolo (La fine del mondo), which I had missed out before:-

Following the good advice of comments on my blog, I set off to the Arsenale by way of the Chiesa della Madonna dell’Orto.   This is not logical, I know, but I was intrigued by the idea of seeing works in their original setting.   I passed S. Giovanni Crisostomo, by Mauro Coducci.   Early morning mass was about to begin:-

Then, through Cannareggio to the church of Madonna dell’Orto, rather remote, a Gothic barn, with grand Tintorettos in the apse and, on the right, a very beautiful altarpiece of Saint John the Baptist and other saints (c.1495), still in its original (stone) frame:-

I hopped on a vaporetto to the Arsenale, the end of the tour.

Of all the things I have seen in Venice, particularly in connection with the Biennale, by far the most powerful has been the installation by Axel Vervoordt in the Palazzo Fortuny on the theme of Intuition.   Ten years ago, the Palazzo Pesaro, which was left to the city of Venice by the childless Mariano Fortuny on his death in 1949, was in a state of disrepair.   Vervoordt kept its state of picturesque decay intact and this year has done a beautiful, powerful set of atmospheric installations, combining ethnographic material with contemporary art.   I have seldom seen this form of highly aestheticised, abstract display done so well, except maybe in Peter Zumthor’s Kolumba Museum in Cologne.

The displays began with a group of prehistoric monuments in a darkened room, some at least borrowed from the Soulages Museum in Rodez:-

Round a corner, there’s a recent Antony Gormley (2013) and a work by Anish Kapoor:-

Upstairs, one comes into the grand first floor salone, with views out over the roofs of Venice and a vast and atmospheric black-and-gold work by El Anatsui:-

Elsewhere in the room, there are mixed display cases, with works displayed against patterned silk:-

I again strayed further off the beaten track than I was planning to, wandering round the Dorsoduro en route to Stephen Chambers’s exhibition in the Ca’ Dandolo.

Starting in the Gesuati, where an entry by Keith Christiansen of the Met. on 18th. century Venice, encouraged me to pay closer attention to the paintings and statuary than I might have done:-

Then, S. Trovaso and its adjacent boatyard:-

This is the door of Spirito Santo, an Augustinian convent on the fondamenta Zattere, long closed:-

And the scuola next door:-

Then I went to the Ca’ Rezzonico:-

And San Sebastiano, the last church on my church crawl, with its great Veroneses:-

I wasn’t planning to see so much work by Tiepolo, but, by focussing on the eighteenth-century parts of Venice, his work is wonderfully dominant, most of all in the Ca’ Rezzonico, where, in 1758, he painted a ceiling in ten days to celebrate the wedding of Ludovico Rezzonico, showing the bride and groom travelling in Apollo’s chariot:-

Earlier in the morning I had admired his ceiling painting in the Gesuati:-

And his Madonna and Child with Saints (1748) in the aisle:-

The Accademia at 8.15 is beautifully empty.   It means I could spend half an hour at least with the Bellinis.

The Madonna and Saints from S. Giobbe (c.1478):-

The inscription on his Pietà (c.1500):-

And Giorgione’s Tempesta which didn’t make it to our Giorgione exhibition:-

Then to the exhibition Philip Guston and the Poets, which is at least as much about his response to Renaissance art, including Masaccio and Piero, as a winner of the Prix de Rome in 1948.   I like the story of him meeting the great masters in heaven and one of them patting him on the back and saying, Not bad, sonny.   Pas mal’.

This is his Self-portrait (1944):-

And his Pantheon (1973):-

I missed the opening week – actually, I’ve never been – and have instead come with the RA Patrons.

What follows are random observations.

The first pavilion which really caught my attention in the Arsenale was the Italian one, consisting of three artists – Giorgio Andreotta Càlo, Roberto Cuoghi and Adelita Husni- Bey exploring the world of Ernestode Martino’s Il mondo magico, partly because there’s a sense of history, as well as installation:-

I liked the Welsh pavilion by James Richards, partly because it is separate from everything else and I found it by accident exploring the back streets of Castello:-

I expected to like Phyllida Barlow’s installation in the British pavilion, and did:  grand, large-scale, confident, arbitrary, celebratory mess:-

I thought the American work by Mark Bradford was strong.   Maybe it’s because I’m more attuned to the aesthetic.   And the spaces are coherent:-

Overall, there is a strange ambiguity between the idea of national pavilions, constructed with a pre-second world war idea of separate national identities, competing in an art olympics, and, on the other hand, the global themes of film, dystopia, music and migration which are mostly on display.